The world of astronomy has changed. An astronomer used to have to travel to a remote location and endure long, cold nights, patiently guiding a telescope to collect precious photons of light. Now, a proliferation of online ...

(Phys.org) —NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has shed new light on the mystery of why giant elliptical galaxies have few, if any, young stars. This new evidence highlights the important role that supermassive black holes ...

(Phys.org) —This new Hubble picture is the sharpest ever image of the core of spiral galaxy Messier 61. Taken using the High Resolution Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, the central part of the galaxy is ...

Contradicting past theories, cold gas has been found in abundance in some elliptical galaxies—showing that there must be some other explanation why these types of galaxies don't form new stars. Astronomers believe that ...

(Phys.org) —A trio of researchers, two from the University of Hawaii, and one from the University of Dunham in the U.K. has found evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope that suggests jellyfish galaxies come about when ...

It has long puzzled scientists that there were enormously massive galaxies that were already old and no longer forming new stars in the very early universe, approx. 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Now new research from ...

(Phys.org) —NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered the long-suspected underlying population of galaxies that produced the bulk of new stars during the universe's early years. They are the smallest, faintest, and most ...

(Phys.org) —This image from Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). ...

(Phys.org) —Galaxies are social beasts that are mostly found in groups or clusters – large assemblies of galaxies that are permeated by even larger amounts of diffuse gas. With temperatures of 10 million degrees or more, ...

Elliptical galaxy

An elliptical galaxy is a galaxy having an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless brightness profile. They range in shape from nearly spherical to highly flattened and in size from hundreds of millions to over one trillion stars.

Elliptical galaxies are one of the three main classes of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work “The Realm of the Nebulae”, along with spiral and lenticular galaxies.

Most elliptical galaxies are composed of older, low-mass stars, with a sparse interstellar medium and minimal star formation activity. They are surrounded by large numbers of globular clusters. Elliptical galaxies are believed to make up approximately 10-15% of galaxies in the local Universe but are not the dominant type of galaxy in the universe overall. They are preferentially found close to the centers of galaxy clusters and are less common in the early Universe.